Blu-ray is the colour

The format war is over. HD DVD is dead. Long live Blu-ray.

After a two-year battle between Toshiba and Sony, Toshiba has announced that it is to stop production of HD DVD players. This clears the way for Sony’s Blu-ray to become the industry standard format for high definition DVD systems.

There are several strategic and marketing reasons why Sony emerged the winner in the format war. However, the trump card seems to have been the Sony PlayStation3. The PS3 computer games console comes pre-fitted with a Blu-ray player. High sales volumes of the console meant that Sony quickly built a significant installed base of Blu-ray players. There were ten times as many PS3s out there as there were Toshiba HD DVD players. No wonder the major film studios prefered to support the Blu-ray platform.

There are a couple of useful BBC news clips on this story which would make a good lesson resource:

Comparing the two platforms

Toshiba decides to pull out of HD DVD